On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 8:45 PM, Ian Zimmerman <itz@very.loosely.org> wrote:
On 2017-08-31 17:47, Larry McVoy wrote:

>       IF (expr)
>       BEGIN
>               blah
>               blah
>               blah
>       END
>
> I'm sorry but I'm with whoever it was that said { } are better than
> BEGIN END.  Seems trivial but it's not to me.

IMO, that's taking 1 part of a large coherent whole and judging by that.
I am terrible with metaphors and similes, but maybe a bit like saying "I
don't like the GPL because it restricts what I can do with my code."

Here's another construct from C:

for (i = n; i > 0; --i) {
    blah();
}

In a language like Pascal (really Algol), that is

FOR i = n TO 0 DO
    Blah()
DONE

That's much closer typing-wise, isn't it?  That's because of the melding
of the brackets with the control structure keywords.  But you can't do
that _and_ have braces.

Today  I might agree with you because of the fancy IDEs coupled with the huge screen size makes this a little easier to read.

When I learned, screen space was at a premium (24x80) so I had to make every line count and pack in as much as I could. And any short cut to typing also helped me write things faster, so I gravitated to C as soon as it was available at an affordable price... It also was easier to do via dialup at 1200 or 2400 baud.

But then again, I still write in 'C' because I find it easiest to grok after 35 years of use... I'm also teaching python to my son and haven't introduced C and compilers and makefiles. python just runs and the indenting thing, though it offends my aesthetic, isn't a big deal with a decent editor.

Warner